Johnny Cash supports new digital copyright legislation........
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SciTech CEO Backs Copyright Treaty Legislation
****SciTech CEO Backs Copyright Treaty Legislation 09/18/97 WASHINGTON, DC, U.S.A., 1997 SEP 18 (NB) -- By Bill Pietrucha. What does SciTech Software Inc. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Tom Ryan have in common with country music singer/songwriter Johnny Cash? Both are supporting the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright Treaties Implementation Act, H.R. 2281, now working its way through Congressional committee hearings.
The Act, introduced last July in the US House of Representatives by Rep. Howard Coble (R-North Carolina), will amend US copyright law to allow the Senate to ratify the international intellectual property treaties negotiated last year in Geneva.
"The treaties do not require any change in the substance of copyright rights or exceptions in US law," Coble said. "They address the problems posed by the possible circumvention of technologies, such as encryption, which will be used to protect copyrighted works in the digital environment and for the development of secure, online licensing systems."
Coble, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on courts and intellectual property, said the two treaties produced last December by the WIPO, the copyright treaty and the performances and phonograms treaty, "are extremely important to ensure adequate protection for American works in countries around the world."
The copyright treaty will protect copyrighted material in the digital environment, including the Internet, Coble said, while the performances and phonograms treaty will provide stronger international protection to performers and producers of phonograms.
Ryan, speaking before the subcommittee as a representative of SciTech Software and the Software Publishers Association (SPA), said the treaty would provide copyright owners with the legal tools needed to fight "unauthorized circumvention of technological protection on computer software and other copyrighted works."
"SciTech has been battling software piracy all along, but last spring, the problem got worse," Ryan told the subcommittee. "My company received threats from an extortionist. Unless we paid him $20,000, he would broadcast, on the Internet, the instructions to disable the timer mechanism for SciTech Display Doctor.
"This would enable those who downloaded the trial version of our software to keep using it indefinitely without paying," he said.
Ryan said piracy cost the software industry at least $11 billion around the world in 1996, and H.R. 2281 would prevent such acts of piracy by implementing Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty. Article 11 would prohibit the circumvention of effective technological measures used by copyright owners to control access to works.
The act would also enable copyright owners to take action against Internet sites that offer unauthorized serial numbers to install pirated software.
The Man in Black, testifying on behalf of the performance and phonogram treaty, noted that earlier this week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) searched the Web for Cash's songs, and found a recording of his "Walk the Line" on a site in Slovenia.
"We're not recording on vinyl anymore," Cash said. "We're recording on computer disks where there are hundreds of songs for the taking."
Cash, who has recorded more than 400 songs in a career going back some 40 years, noted that the recording industry now is "a digital industry, and music is changing hands at incredible speeds. Push a button and it's gone."
H.R. 2281 would provide civil remedies, including temporary and permanent injunctions, monetary recovery, and seizure and remedial modification or destruction of offending products, as well as criminal penalties for those who "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain" violate the act.
The Act is not without its detractors, however. In earlier testimony, the Digital Future Coalition (DFC) warned that the Act is "anti- consumer, anti-technology, anti-competitive, and threatens personal privacy.
Douglas Bennett, testifying for the DFC, said the bill "is gravely flawed and what it omits is critical to industry and society as a whole."
Bennett said the sections of the Copyright Act "threaten to upset the existing balance of our copyright system and go beyond anything that is required to bring US law into conformity with the WIPO treaties."
The Act, Bennett said, attempts to ban all devices that could be used to circumvent technological measures designed to restrict access or prevent unauthorized reproductions of copyrighted works.
In doing so, he said, the Act "threatens to stifle innovation and effectively negate privileges users and consumers now enjoy under our copyright law, such as fair use."
(19970918/Press Contact: Megan Harrison, SciTech Software Inc., 916-894-8400; e-mail MeganH@scitechsoft.com Reported by Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com /WORLDCOPY/PHOTO)
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